This is the text of the Commencement
address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of
Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005 at Stanford.

I am honored to be with you today
at your commencement from one of the finest universities
in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be
told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.
Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's
it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting
the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College
after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for
another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did
I drop out?

It started before I was born.
My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student,
and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very
strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything
was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his
wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute
that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a
waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking:
"We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said:
"Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother
had never graduated from college and that my father had never
graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption
papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents
promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to
college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive
as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings
were being spent on my college tuition. After six months,
I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to
do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me
figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my
parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to
drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty
scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions
I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking
the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin
dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic.
I didn't
have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms,
I returned coke bottles for the 5? deposits to buy food
with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night
to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.
I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my
curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.
Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered
perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.
Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer,
was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and
didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a
calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about
serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space
between different letter combin- ations, about what makes great
typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically
subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I
found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope
of any practical application in my life. But ten years later,
when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came
back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It
was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never
dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have
never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.
And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal
computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would
have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal
computers might not have the wonderful typography that they
do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking
forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking
backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the
dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.
So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect
in your future. You have to trust in something - your
gut, destiny, life, karma, what- ever. This approach has
never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love
and
loss.

I was lucky - I found what I
loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents
garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years
Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a
$2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had
just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier,
and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired.
How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as
Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to
run the company with me, and for the first year or so things
went well. But then our visions of the future began
to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we
did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was
out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire
adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to
do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous
generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton
as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and
Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly.
I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running
away from the valley. But some- thing slowly began to dawn on
me - I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple
had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was
still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it
turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing
that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of
being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner
again, less sure about everything. It freed me
to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I
started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar,
and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife.
Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated
feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation
studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events,
Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we
developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance.
And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this
would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was
awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.
Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose
faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going
was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you
love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your
lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life,
and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what
you believe is great work. And the only way to do great
work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet,
keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart,
you'll know when you find it. And, like any great
relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll
on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote
that went something like: "If you live each day as if
it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right."
It made an impression on me, and since then, for the
past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning
and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life,
would I want to do what I am about to do today?"
And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a
row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead
soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to
help me make the big choices in life. Because almost
everything - all external expect- ations, all pride, all fear
of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away
in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way
I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something
to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason
not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed
with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning,
and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't
even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told
me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable,
and that I should expect to live no longer than
three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home
and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare
to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything
you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them
in just a few months. It means to make sure everything
is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible
for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all
day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck
an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and
into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and
got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my
wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the
cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because
it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic
cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery
and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been
to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for
a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can
now say this to you with a bit more certainty than
when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even
people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to
get there. And yet death is the destination we all share.
No one has ever escaped it. And that is
as it should be, because Death is very likely the single
best invention of Life. It is Life's change
agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.
Right now the new is you, but someday not too long
from now, you will gradually become the old and
be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is
quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't
waste it living someone else's life. Don't
be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results
of other people's thinking. Don't let the
noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice.
And most important, have the courage to follow your
heart and intuition. They somehow already know what
you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an
amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog,
which was one of the bibles of my generation.
It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not
far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it
to life with his poetic touch. This was in the
late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop
publishing, so it was all made with typewriters,
scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was
sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before
Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing
with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out
several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then
when it had run its course, they put out a final
issue. It was the mid- 1970s, and I was your age.
On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph
of an early morning country road, the kind
you might find your- self hitchhiking on if you were
so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay
Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their
farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay
Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself.
And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish
that for you.

General Westmoreland, General
Groves, distinguished guests, and gentlemen of the Corps.
As I was leaving the hotel this morning, a doorman asked me,
"Where are you bound for, General?" and when I replied, "West Point,"
he remarked, "Beautiful place, have you ever been there before?"

No human being could fail to
be deeply moved by such a tribute as this, coming from a profession
I have served so long and a people I have loved so well.
It fills me with an emotion I cannot express. But this
award is not intended primarily for a personality, but to symbolize
a great moral code - the code of conduct and chivalry of those
who guard this beloved land of culture and ancient descent.
That is the meaning of this medallion. For all eyes
and for all time, it is an expression of the ethics of the American
soldier. That I should be integrated in this way with
so noble an ideal arouses a sense of pride and yet of humility
which will be with me always.

"Duty," "Honor," "Country" -
those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you
want to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are
your rallying point to build courage when courage seems to fail,
to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith,
to create hope when hope becomes forlorn. Unhappily, I
possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination,
nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that
they mean.

The unbelievers will say they
are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase.
Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite,
every troublemaker, and, I am sorry to say, some others of
an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them even
to the extent of mockery and ridicule.

But these are some of the things
they do. They build your basic character. They
mold you for your future roles as the custodians of the nation's defense.
They make you strong enough to know when you are
weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid.

They teach you to be proud and
unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success;
not to substitute words for action; not to seek the
path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty
and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm, but
to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself
before you seek to master others; to have a heart that
is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never
forget how to weep; to reach into the future, yet never neglect
the past; to be serious, yet never take yourself too
seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity
of true greatness; the open mind of true wisdom, the
meekness of true strength.

They give you a temperate will,
a quality of imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness
of the deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance
of courage over timidity, an appetite for adventure
over love of ease. They create in your heart the
sense of wonder, the unfailing hope of what next,
and the joy and inspiration of life. They teach you
in this way to be an officer and a gentleman.

And what sort of soldiers are
those you are to lead? Are they reliable? Are they
brave? Are they capable of victory?

Their story is known to all of
you. It is the story of the American man at arms.
My estimate of him was formed on the battlefields many, many
years ago, and has never changed. I regarded him
then, as I regard him now, as one of the world's noblest figures;
not only as one of the finest military characters,
but also as one of the most stainless.

His name and fame are the birthright
of every American citizen. In his youth
and strength, his love and loyalty, he gave all that mortality can
give. He needs no eulogy from me, or from any other man.
He has written his own history and written it in red
on his enemy's breast.

But when I think of his patience
under adversity, of his courage under fire, and of his
modesty in victory, I am filled with an emotion of admiration
I cannot put into words. He belongs to history
as furnishing one of the greatest examples of successful
patriotism. He belongs to posterity as the instructor
of future generations in the principles of liberty and
freedom. He belongs to the present, to us, by his virtues
and by his achievements.

In twenty campaigns, on a hundred
battlefields, around a thousand campfires, I have witnessed
that enduring fortitude, that patriotic self-abnegation,
and that invincible determination which
have carved his statue in the hearts of his people.

From one end of the world to
the other, he has drained deep the chalice of courage.
As I listened to those songs of the glee club, in memory's
eye I could see those staggering columns of
the First World War, bending under soggy packs on many a
weary march, from dripping dusk to drizzling dawn, slogging
ankle deep through mire of shell-pocked roads; to form
grimly for the attack, blue-lipped, covered with sludge
and mud, chilled by the wind and rain, driving home
to their objective, and for many, to the judgment seat of
God.

I do not know the dignity of
their birth, but I do know the glory of their death.
They died unquestioning, uncomplaining, with faith in
their hearts, and on their lips the hope that we would
go on to victory. Always for them: Duty, Honor, Country.
Always their blood, and sweat, and tears, as they saw
the way and the light.

And twenty years after, on the
other side of the globe, against the filth of dirty foxholes,
the stench of ghostly trenches, the slime
of dripping dugouts, those boiling suns of the relentless
heat, those torrential rains of devastating storms,
the loneliness and utter desolation of jungle trails,
the bitterness of long separation of those they loved
and cherished, the deadly pestilence of tropic
disease, the horror of stricken areas of war.

Their resolute and determined
defense, their swift and sure attack, their indomitable
purpose, their complete and decisive victory - always
victory, always through the bloody haze of their last
reverberating shot, the vision of gaunt, ghastly men,
reverently following your password of Duty, Honor, Country.

The code which those words perpetuate
embraces the highest moral laws and will
stand the test of any ethics or philosophies ever promulgated
for the uplift of mankind. Its requirements
are for the things that are right, and its restraints are
from the things that are wrong. The soldier, above all
other men, is required to practice the greatest act of
religious training - sacrifice. In battle and
in the face of danger and death, he discloses those divine
attributes which his Maker gave when he created man
in his own image. No physical courage and no brute
instinct can take the place of the Divine help which
alone can sustain him. However horrible the incidents
of war may be, the soldier who is called upon to
offer and to give his life for his country, is the
noblest development of mankind.

You now face a new world, a world
of change. The thrust into outer space of the satellite,
spheres and missiles marked the beginning of another
epoch in the long story of mankind - the chapter of
the space age. In the five or more billions of years the
scientists tell us it has taken to form the earth, in
the three or more billion years of development of the
human race, there has never been a greater, a more abrupt
or staggering evolution. We deal now not with things
of this world alone, but with the illimitable distances
and as yet unfathomed mysteries of the universe.
We are reaching out for a new and boundless frontier.
We speak in strange terms: of harnessing the cosmic energy;
of making winds and tides work for us; of creating
unheard synthetic materials to supplement or even
replace our old standard basics; of purifying sea water
for our drink; of mining ocean floors for new fields
of wealth and food; of disease preventatives to expand
life into the hundred of years; of controlling the
weather for a more equitable distribution of heat and cold,
of rain and shine; of space ships to the moon; of
the primary target in war, no longer limited to the armed
forces of an enemy, but instead to include his civil
populations; of ultimate conflict between a united human
race and the sinister forces of some other planetary
galaxy; of such dreams and fantasies as to make life
the most exciting of all time.

And through all this welter of
change and development your mission remains fixed,
determined, inviolable. It is to win our wars. Everything
else in your professional career is but corollary
to this vital dedication. All other
public purpose, all other public projects, all other public
needs, great or small, will find others for
their accomplishments; but you are the ones who are
trained to fight.

Yours is the profession of arms,
the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there
is no substitute for victory, that if you lose, the
Nation will be destroyed, that the very obsession of your
public service must be Duty, Honor, Country.

Others will debate the controversial
issues, national and international, which divide
men's minds. But serene, calm, aloof, you stand
as the Nation's war guardians, as its lifeguards
from the raging tides of international conflict, as
its gladiators in the arena of battle. For a
century and a half you have defended, guarded and protected
its hallowed traditions of liberty and freedom, of right
and justice.

These great national problems
are not for your professional participation or
military solution. Your guidepost stands out like
a tenfold beacon in the night: Duty, Honor, Country.

You are the leaven which binds
together the entire fabric of our national system
of defense. From your ranks come the great captains
who hold the Nation's destiny in their hands
the moment the war tocsin sounds.

The long gray line has never
failed us. Were you to do so, a million ghosts in
olive
drab, in brown khaki, in blue and gray, would
rise from their white crosses, thundering those magic
words: Duty, Honor, Country.

This does not mean that you are
warmongers. On the contrary, the soldier above
all other people prays for peace, for he must suffer
and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. But
always in our ears ring the ominous words of Plato,
that wisest of all philosophers: "Only the dead
have seen the end of war."

The shadows are lengthening for
me. The twilight is here. My days of old have
vanished - tone and tints. They have gone glimmering through
the dreams of things that were. Their memory
is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears and coaxed
and caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen
then, but with thirsty ear, for the witching melody of faint
bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long
roll.

In my dreams I hear again the
crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful
mutter of the battle- field. But in the evening
of my memory I come back to West Point. Always there
echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, Country.

Today marks my final roll call
with you. But I want you to know that when I cross
the river, my last conscious thoughts will be of
the Corps, and the Corps, and the Corps.

It's a great honor for me to
be the third member of my family to receive an honorary doctorate
from this great university. It's an honor to follow my great-Uncle
Jim, who was a gifted physician, and my Uncle Jack,
who is a remarkable businessman.

Both of them could have told
you something important about their professions, about medicine
or commerce. I have no specialized field of interest or expertise,
which puts me at a disadvantage, talking to you today.
I'm a novelist. My work is human nature. Real life is all I know.

Don't ever confuse the two, your
life and your work. The second is only part of the first.

Don't ever forget the words my
father sent me on a postcard last year: "If You win the rat race,
you're still a rat." Or what John Lennon wrote before he
was gunned down in the driveway of the Dakota: "Life is what happens
while you are busy making other plans."

You walk out of here this afternoon
with only one thing that no one else has. There will
be hundreds of people out there with your same degree; there will
be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living.
But you will be the only person alive who has sole custody of
your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not
just your life at a desk, or your life on a bus, or in a car, or at
the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of
your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul.

People don't talk about the soul
very much anymore. It's so much easier to write a resume
than to craft a spirit. But a resume is a cold comfort on
a winter night, or when you're sad, or broke, or lonely, or when
you've gotten back the test results and they're not so good.

Here is my resume.

I am a good mother to three children.
I have tried never to let my Profession stand in the
way of being a good parent. I no longer consider myself the
center of the universe. I show up. I listen. I try to
laugh.

I am a good friend to my husband.
I have tried to make marriage vows mean what they say. I show up. I listen. I try to
laugh.

I am a good friend to my friends,
and they to me. Without them, there would be nothing to say
to you today, because I would be a cardboard cutout. But I call
them on the phone, and I meet them for lunch. I show up. I listen. I try to
laugh.

I would be rotten, or at best
mediocre at my job, if those other things were not true.
You cannot be really first rate at your work if your work is all
you are.

So here's what I wanted to tell
you today: get a life.

A real life, not a manic pursuit
of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger
house. Do you think you'd care so very much about those things
if you blew an aneurysm one after- noon, or found a lump in your
breast?

Get a life in which you notice
the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over Seaside
Heights, a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed
hawk circles over the water gap or the way a baby scowls with
concentration when she tries to pick up a Cheerio with her thumb
and first finger.

Get a life in which you are not
alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And
remember that love is not leisure; it is work. Each time you look
at your diploma, remember that you are still a student, still learning
how to best treasure your connection to others.

Get a life in which you are generous.
Look around at the azaleas in the suburban neighborhood
where you grew up; look at a full moon hanging silver in
a black, black sky on a cold night. And realize that life
is the best thing ever, and that you have no business taking
it for granted.

Care so deeply about its goodness
that you want to spread it around. Take money you
would have spent on beers and give it to charity. Work in a
soup kitchen. Be a big brother or sister. All of you want
to do well. But if you do not do good, too, then doing well will
never be enough.

It is so easy to waste our lives:
our days, our hours, our minutes. It is so easy
to take for granted the color of the azaleas, the sheen of the limestone
on Fifth Avenue, the color of our kids' eyes, the way the
melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises
again. It is so easy to exist instead of live.

I learned to live many years
ago. Something really, really bad happened to me, something
that changed my life in ways that, if I had my druthers,
it would never have been changed at all. And what I learned
from it is what, today, seems to be the hardest lesson of all.
I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned
that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee
you get. I learned to look at all the good in the
world and to try to give some of it back because I believed
in it completely and utterly.

And I tried to do that, in part,
by telling others what I had learned. By telling them this:

Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby's
ear. Read in the backyard with the
sun on your face. Learn to be happy.

And think of life as a terminal
illness because if you do, you will live it with joy and passion
as it ought to be lived. Well, you can learn all those
things, out there, if you get a real life, a full life, a professional
life, yes, but another life, too, a life of love and
laughs and a connection to other human beings.

Just keep your eyes and ears
open. Here you could learn in the classroom. There the
classroom is everywhere. The exam comes at the very end.
No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time at
the office.

I found one of my best teachers
on the boardwalk at Coney Island maybe 15 Years ago.
It was December, and I was doing a story about how the homeless
survive in the winter months. He and I sat on the edge of
the wooden supports, dangling our feet over the side, and he told
me about his schedule, pan- handling the boulevard when
the summer crowds were gone, sleeping in a church when the
temperature went below freezing, hiding from the police amidst
the Tilt-a-Whirl and the Cyclone and some of the other seasonal
rides.

But he told me that most of the
time he stayed on the board- walk, facing the water, just
the way we were sitting now, even when it got cold and he had
to wear his newspapers after he read them.

And I asked him why. Why
didn't he go to one of the shelters? Why didn't he check himself
into the hospital for detox? And he just stared out at the Ocean
and said, "Look at the view, young lady. Look at the view."

And every day, in some little
way, I try to do what he said. I try to look at the view.
And that's the last thing I have to tell you today, words of
wisdom from a man with not a dime in his pocket, no place to go,
nowhere to be.

You all know this, that life
is a journey and I want to share with you just for a few moments
about five things, (aren't you glad they aren't ten) five things
that have made this journey for me exciting. Five
lessons .... I've learned that have helped me to make my life better.

First of all, life
is a journey. .... It took me a while
to get that lesson, that it really is just about everyday
experiences, teaching you, moment in, moment out, who
you really are. That every experience is here to teach you
more fully how to be who you really are.

Because, for a long time I wanted
to be somebody else.... [snip]... but it was a lesson
long in coming, recognizing that I had the instinct, that inner
voice that told me that you need to try to find a way to
answer to your own truth was the voice I needed to be still and
listen to.

One of the other
great lessons I learned taught to me by my friend and mentor,
Maya Angelou and if you can get this, you can save
yourself a lot of time.... When people show you
who they are, believe them, the first time.

Not the 29th time! That
is particularly good when it comes to men situations because when
he doesn't call back the first time, when you are mistreated
the first time, when you see someone who shows you a lack
of integrity or dishonesty the first time, know that that will
be followed by many, many, many other times that will at
some point in life come back to haunt or hurt you.

Turn your wounds
into wisdom. You will be wounded many times in your life.
You'll make mistakes. Some people will call them
failures but I have learned that failure is really God's
way of saying, "Excuse me, you're moving in the wrong direction."

I remember being taken off the
air in Baltimore, being told that I was no longer being fit
for television and that I could not anchor the news...
[snip] ..because... I would cry for the people in the stories,
which really wasn't very effective as a news reporter
... [snip] ... it wasn't until I was demoted as an on-air anchor
woman and thrown into the talk show arena to get rid of
me, that I allowed my own truth to come through.

Be grateful.

I have kept a journal since I
was l5 years old and if you look back on my journal when
I was l5, l6, it's all filled with boy trouble, men trouble,
my daddy wouldn't let me go to Shoney's with Anthony Otie,
things like that. As I've grown older, I have learned
to appreciate living in the moment and I ask that you do,
too.....

Every night
list five things that happened this day, in days to
come that you are grateful for. What it will begin
to do is to change your perspective of your day
and your life. I believe that if you can learn to
focus on what you have, you will always see that
the universe is abundant and you will have more.
If you concentrate and focus in your life on what you
don't have, you will never have enough. Be grateful.
Keep a journal.

You all are all over my journal
tonight.

Create the
highest, grandest vision possible for your life
because you become what you believe.

When I was little girl, Mississippi,
growing up on the farm, only Buckwheat as a role
model, watching my grand- mother boil clothes in a big,
iron pot through the screen door, because we didn't have
a washing machine and made everything we had. I watched
her and realized somehow inside myself, in the spirit
of myself, that although this was segregated Mississippi and
I was "colored" and female, that my life could be bigger,
greater than what I saw. I remember being four or five
years old, I certainly couldn't articulate it, but it was a
feeling and a feeling that I allowed myself to follow.
I allowed myself to follow it because if you were to ask me
what is the secret to my success, it is because I understand
that there is a power greater than myself, that rules
my life and in life if you can be still long enough in
all of your endeavors, the good times, the hard times, to connect
yourself to the source, I call it God, you can call it
whatever you want to, the force, nature, Allah, the power.

If you can
connect yourself to the source and allow the energy
that is your personality, your life force to be connected
to the greater force, anything is possible
for you. I am proof of that.

I think that my life, the fact
that I was born where I was born, and the time that I was
and have been able to do what I have done speaks to the possibility.
Not that I am special, but that it could be
done.

Hold the highest, grandest vision for yourself.

Just recently [1997] we followed
Tina Turner around the country [snip]... because ....
Tina Turner is one of those women who have overcome great
obstacles, was battered in her life, and like a phoenix
rose out of that to have great legs and a great sense of herself.
Tina's life is a mirror of your life because it proves
that you can overcome.

Every life speaks to the power of what can be done.

So I wanted to honor women all
over the country and celebrate their dreams... and Tina's tour
was called the Wildest Dreams Tour. I asked women to
write me their wildest dreams and tell me what their wildest dreams
were. Our intention was to fulfill their wildest dreams.
We got 77,000 letters, 77,000. To our disappointment we found
that the deeper the wound the smaller the dreams. So
many women had such small visions, such small dreams for their
lives that we had a difficult time coming up with dreams to
fulfill. So we did fulfill some. We paid off all
the college debt, hmmm, for a young woman whose mother had died
and she put her sisters and brothers through school.
We paid off all the bills for a woman who had been battered
and managed to put herself through college and her daughter
through college. We sent a woman to Egypt who was dying
of cancer and her lifetime dream was to sit on a camel
and use a cell phone. We bought a house for another woman
whose dream had always been to have her own home but
because she was battered and had to flee with her children
one night, had to leave the home seventeen years ago.
And then we brought the other women who said we just
wanted to see you, Oprah, and meet Tina. That was
their dream! Imagine when we paid off the debt, gave the
house, gave the trip to Egypt, the attitudes we got from the
women who said, "I just want to see you." And some of them
afterwards were crying to me saying that "we didn't know,
we didn't know, and this is unfair," and I said, that is
the lesson: you needed to dream a bigger dream for yourself.

That is the lesson.
Hold the highest vision possible for your life
and it can come true.

If I could offer you only one
tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term
benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas
the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my
own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy the power and beauty of
your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the
power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But
trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself
and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility
lay before you and how fabulous you really looked.
You are not as fat as you imagine.

Don't worry about the future.
Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as
trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum.
The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that
never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside
you at 4 pm on some idle Tuesday.

Do one thing every day that scares
you.

Sing.

Don't be reckless with other
people's hearts. Don't put up with people who are reckless
with yours.

Floss.

Don't waste your time on jealousy.
Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind.
The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself.

Remember compliments you receive.
Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell
me how.

Keep your old love letters. Throw
away your old bank statements.

Stretch.

Don't feel guilty if you don't
know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting
people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do
with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds
I know still don't.

Get plenty of calcium.
Be kind to your knees. You'll miss them when they're gone.

Enjoy your body. Use it
every way you can. Don't be afraid of it or of what other people
think of it. It's the greatest instrument you'll ever own.

Dance, even if you have nowhere
to do it but your living room.

Read the directions, even if
you don't follow them.

Do not read beauty magazines.
They will only make you feel ugly.

Get to know your parents.
You never know when they'll be gone for good.

Be nice to your siblings.
They're your best link to your past and the people most likely
to stick with you in the future.

Understand that friends come
and go, but with a precious few you should hold on.

Work hard to bridge the gaps
in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the
more you need the people who knew you when you were young.

Live in New York City once, but
leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern
California once, but leave before it makes you soft.

Travel.

Accept certain inalienable truths:
Prices will rise. Politicians will philander.
You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize
that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians
were noble, and children respected their elders.

Respect your elders.

Don't expect anyone else to support
you. Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe you'll
have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either one
might run out.

Don't mess too much with your
hair or by the time you're 40 it will look 85.

Be careful whose advice you buy,
but be patient with those who supply it.

Advice is a form of nostalgia.
Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal,
wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling
it for more than it's worth.

Origins: Kurt Vonnegut was not
the 1997 commencement speaker at MIT. That honor went
to Kofi Annan,
secretary-general of the United Nations. The
speech attributed to Vonnegut was actually a 1 June 1997 column
by Chicago Tribune writer Mary Schmich. As with many
other good bits of writing and speech, the attachment of a famous name
to the works brings them to the public's attention in a
way they could otherwise not have

(Echoes within echoes: Georgia
State University graduates may remember Ted Turner's speech
at their graduation in 1994. Turner, facing a skin cancer operation,
told them: "The one piece of advice I can give you is put
on sunscreen and wear a hat.")

In 1998, the text of the Mary
Schmich piece was turned into a "spoken voice" recording featuring
the voice of Australian actor Lee Perry. Titled
"Everybody's Free to Wear Sunscreen," the piece immediately became
a cult hit in Australia, and by early 1999 the "song" was taking
America by storm.

2002 saw the "Vonnegut/MIT commencement
speech" tale circulated anew, that time identified as
the speech given to the graduating class of 2002.